The Radical Left in Europe

The Radical Left in Europe The Radical Left in Europe – Rediscovering Hope Edited by Walter Baier, Eric Canepa 2019 and Haris Golemis MERLIN PRESS transform! Yearbook 2019 The Radical Left in Europe – Rediscovering Hope English edition published in the UK in 2019 by The Merlin Press Central Books Building Freshwater Road London RM8 1RX www.merlinpress.co.uk Editors: Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, Haris Golemis Managing Editor: Klemens Herzog Editorial Board: Walter Baier, Lutz Brangsch, Eric Canepa, Erhard Crome, Haris Golemis, Bernhard Müller, Dagmar Švendová transform! europe EUPF, Square de Meeûs 25, 1000 Brussels, Belgium Partially financed through a subsidy from the European Parliament Cover Illustration: Stavroula Drakopoulou ISSN 1865-3480 ISBN 978-0-85036-751-5 Printed in the UK by Imprint Digital, Exeter Contents Preface Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, Haris Golemis: The Radical Left in Europe – Rediscovering Hope 7 Becoming Subjects of History – Art, Theory, and Politics Frigga Haug: Contradictions in Marxist Feminism 21 Eva Brenner: A Theatre of Self-Emancipation – Jura Soyfer on Stage in Contemporary Vienna 35 Challenges for Left Strategy Tamás Krausz: Searching for Alternatives – Interviewed by Róbert Nárai 51 Walter Baier: Lenin, Luxemburg, Bauer – The Left and the National 73 Hans-Jürgen Urban: The Issue of Immigration – A Crucial Test for the Mosaic Left? 85 Alexandros Kioupkiolis: Counter-Hegemony, the Commons, and New City Politics 98 Theodora Kotsaka: Commons Transition and the Role of the State – A New Question for the Left 112 Labour, Precarity, and Organisation Bernd Riexinger: Connective Class Politics as an Inspiration for the Left 127 Jane McAlevey: Restoring Working-Class Power – Super Majority Strikes 136 Peter Ullrich: In Itself, But Not Yet For Itself – Organising the New Academic Precariat 155 The Left and the Question of Europe Luciana Castellina, Judith Dellheim, and Gabi Zimmer: Reclaim the Manifesto of Ventotene! 171 Heinz Bierbaum: The European Left – Its Current State and Prospects 182 Klaus Busch: The Crises of the EU and Eurozone – National Regression Blocks Solutions 194 Anniversaries Yannis Almpanis, Mátyás Benyik, Raffaella Bolini, Judith Dellheim, Haris Golemis, and Christophe Ventura: Assessing the Anti-Globalisation Movement and the Social Forum Process – A Roundtable 205 Luciana Castellina: Remembering 1968 224 Jiří Málek: The 1968 Prague Spring – A Socialist Project 236 Rossana Rossanda: The Students’ ‘68 and Workers’ ‘69 – Conflicts and Joint Action in the Italian Experience 252 Document: A Colloquium at the Mirafiori Fiat Plant – 1969 256 Erhard Crome: 1989 and Its Consequences for Russia and Germany 273 Tasos Trikkas: The Communist Party of Greece in 2018 – The Centenary of Its Birth and Fifty Years After Its Split 292 Country Reports Jon Trickett: The Challenges Before the Labour Party – Interviewed by Stelios Foteinopoulos 307 Gavin Rae: Conservative Authoritarianism and the Far-Right in Hungary and Poland 315 Ľuboš Blaha: The Central European Left and Europe – Beyond Liberalism 329 Adriano Campos and Alda Sousa: The Radical Left and Social Democracy in Portugal – Achievements and Obstacles 344 The Marxist-Christian Dialogue The Manifesto of Hermoupolis 359 Michael Löwy: Why a Marxist-Christian Dialogue? 361 Nikos Xydakis: Christians and Marxists – The Adventure of a Dialogue 365 Economic Update Joachim Bischoff: The Return of the Economic and Financial Crisis – Nervous Financial Markets and the Slowdown of the Worlwide Boom 373 Authors and Editors 388 Members and Observers of transform! europe 394 Preface This volume, the fifth in the series of yearbooks published by transform! europe, is appearing in the year of the European Parliament elections. Few people in Europe have heard of the Manifesto of Ventotene, and most who were aware of the summit that Hollande, Merkel, and Renzi held on the island of Ventotene in the summer of 2016 in honour of the Manifesto do not know that it was written by anti-fascists imprisoned on the island, notably by Altiero Spinelli, a member of the Italian Communist Party. And fewer still realise that Spinelli and his Federalists protested at the 1957 founding event of the European Economic Community, calling it a ‘monster’ having nothing to do with their ideas. Gabi Zimmer, chair of the GUE/NGL group of the European Parliament, introduces the project calling for the left in Europe to critically reappropriate the Manifesto, and Luciana Castellina argues that a vision of European unity compatible with Spinelli’s original idea is still worth fighting for. At the same time, she proposes a reconfiguration of the notion of European citizenship as a ‘multiple citizenship’ adequate to the realities of migration, much in the spirit of Otto Bauer’s ‘personality principle’. Unfortunately, at the time of this volume’s release it is nearly certain that the extreme, nationalist, and racist right will substantially increase its presence in the new European Parliament, mainly at the expense of social democratic parties, in line with what has already happened in a number of EU Member States. Gavin Rae, in his article on political developments in Poland and Hungary, two countries governed by coalitions of the extreme and populist right, concludes that the only conceivable barrier to the forces of darkness in Central and Eastern European countries is the radical left, something which can be said of Europe as a whole. However, the necessary but insufficient condition for the efficacy of the transformative left is its self- reinvention, for which it needs to look back to its past and recent history, reestablishing the hegemony of class discourse, and improving its theoretical and ideological tools. The transform!2019 yearbook offers contributions to this process. 8 THE RADICAL LEFT IN EUROPE – REDISCOVERING HOPE Both Frigga Haug and Eva Brenner consider the kind of poetic catharsis needed to pierce through the present reality, to see it and situate oneself in it in order to emerge from passive common-sense acceptance of that reality and its illusory assumptions – in order to become active subjects of history, of change and self-change. Haug argues that for women to become a transformative force – that is, agents changing the social totality – they must consciously master the contradiction of entering the realm of wage labour, leaving behind precisely the realm ‘outside’ it that gave them the moral status of being beyond and above the competitive aggression of capitalist society, which is what bestowed on them the quality of being a transformative force in the first place. This will require new mixes of apparently irreconcilable emotions, selflessness and deep desire for emancipation, aggression and softness, a contradiction addressed by Brecht. Whether or not in traditional female roles, women produce and reproduce their lives, the society, and the world, and thus their own oppression, an insight which is incompatible with the ‘victim-perpetrator’ thesis. In a similar aim, in this case with a view to activate theatre audiences, the Viennese theatre director and theorist, Eva Brenner, chronicles the process of reviving and dramatising Thus Died a Party, Jura Soyfer’s1 novel fragment about the collapse of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Brenner and her experimental-political theatre group Fleischerei have been developing this work since 2006, bringing it to a great number of sites, above all district town halls, involving large numbers of local residents, with the notable participation of Vienna’s immigrant population, in a context of appropriating twentieth- century cultural and political traditions – especially the achievements of Red Vienna and the culture of early political avant-garde artists who were largely ostracised by postmodernism. Through the techniques of ‘transformance’, the performances aim, in a way similar to Brecht’s alienation effect, especially in his teaching plays, to draw the audience out of passivity and make them active, thinking subjects of history. The Hungarian historian Tamás Krausz develops Lukács’s concept of a third way beyond Stalinism and capitalist restoration, working with Lukács’s and Mészáros’s theory of the possibility of development alternative to the status quo – of a tertium datur. He explores the reasons for the rise of Stalinism and tracks the history of proposals in the ex-socialist countries of Eastern Europe to socialise state property – that is, to pose the question of real ownership – and reconstitute the communist movement’s original unity of democracy and the economy, thus reconnecting radical democratic demands with the working class. In so doing he sketches the attempts at reviving social PREFACE 9 self-organisation in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well as the development of a Marxist theory of social formations alternative to mechanistic Stalinist theory in various centres within the eastern bloc countries. On the basis of the historic discussions by Luxemburg, Lenin, Bauer, and Renner of nation-states, nationalism, autonomy, and federations Walter Baier provides a framework for understanding false and unnecessary contradictions between the restoration (or construction) of democracy on the national level and the European level today. Analogously to Lukács’s tertium datur, Austro-Marxism’s development of the principle of ‘national- cultural autonomy’ and the ‘personality principle’ offers an alternative to the polarity of ethnic secession, on the one hand, and denial of the ongoing importance of nationalities and

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